Cecil Day Lewis

Cecil Day Lewis, CBE (27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972) was an Irish poet, the British Poet Laureate between 1968 to 1972, and, under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, a mystery writer. He was the father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis and the TYV star Tamasin Day-Lewis.

Quotes

Tempt me no more, for I
Have known the lightning's hour,
The poet's inward pride,
The certainty of power.

Do not expect again the phoenix hour,
The triple-towered sky, the dove's complaining,
Sudden the rain of gold and heart's first ease
Traced under trees by the eldritch light of sundown.

Using the pseudonym Nicholas Blake

Nigel's six feet sprawled all over the place; his gestures were nervous and little uncouth; a lock of sandy coloured hair dropping over his forehead, and the deceptive naïveté of his face in repose gave him a resemblance to an overgrown prep. schoolboy. His eyes were the same blue as his uncle's, but shortsighted and noncommittal. Yet there was an underlying similarity between the two. A latent, sardonic humor in their conversation, a friendliness and simple generosity in their smiles, and that impression of energy in reserve which is always given by those who possess an abundance of life directed towards consciously-realised aims.

They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause.

It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse—
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.

The judgment of Peers : An Anthology of Poems about Poets (1949), p. 61iss

The Apollo Anthology (1953) edited by Lucy Selwyn and Laurier Lister, p. 105

Put out the lights now!
Look at the Tree, the rough tree dazzled
In oriole plumes of flame,
Tinselled with twinkling frost fire, tasselled
With stars and moons

So feast your eyes now
On mimic star and moon-cold bauble:
Worlds may wither unseen,
But the Christmas Tree is a tree of fable,
A phoenix in evergreen

"Is it far to go?" in Modern English poetry (1963) edited by N. Das Gupta, Vol. 2, p. 92

Shall I be gone long?
For ever and a day
To whom there belong?
Ask the stone to say
Ask my song.

Who will say farewell?
The beating bell.
Will anyone miss me?
That I dare not tell —
Quick, Rose, and kiss me.

I am absolutely sure Cecil’s poetry is underrated. He persists in the mind.
- John Betjeman, 1975. Quoted in Peter Standford, "The Forgotten Poet" in The Oldie Magazine, June 2022.

I have found the one great man in these lands - his name is Cecil Day Lewis.
- T. E. Lawrence, 1934. Quoted in Peter Standford, "The Forgotten Poet" in The Oldie Magazine, June 2022.

"The image," says C. Day Lewis in The Poetic Image, "is a method of asserting or reasserting spiritual control over the material." And he makes a very suggestive definition of what the critics have called "pure poetry" as "poetry whose meaning is deliberately concentrated within its images."
- Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)

Day-Lewis was a handsome man, in dress something of a dandy (in the best sense) and with a similar taste in such things as motor cars. In first coming into a room he might give the impression of austerity , but quite soon the mask would relax into its attractive lines of humour. He was, in fact, no mean anecdotalist, often against himself, at one time he had an hilarious story of catching his own dental plate before it could fly into the stalls after an impassioned end to a poetry reading.
- The Times, "Obituary of Cecil Day Lewis", 23rd of May 1972. Quoted in Also quoted in Justin Wintle and Richard Kenin, The Dictionary of Biographical Quotation of British and American subjects. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978 (p.37).

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